A few months back we had a bad wind storm. I was driving home from work in the dark that night on some back country roads. I come around a curve and see some asshole with a flashlight in the middle of the road. Thankfully I wasn't going too fast and I was able to break to a stop without slamming on my brakes.
Turns out it was a lady who lived in a house on the road. One of the old trees from the forest there had fallen into the road, blocking both lanes. With no streetlights there was a good chance if she hadn't been there, I would have ran into it.
As I got out of my car, she told me she was watching to make sure no one hit the tree. She had called the towns emergency line but the police were tied up with other issues from the storm.
Some guy came out of his house up the way a few minutes later. He had a chain saw with him. He, myself, and another driver worked to clear any debris in the road. 5 minutes later the road was perfectly clear, and the driver and chainsaw guy walked off without saying any words.
Those people likely saved myself from car damage, as well as a good 20 minutes at least from having to find an alternate route home.
Every single lenovo product that isn't a thinkpad is a nightmare to repair. Their keyboards are plastic rivited in place, so you have to swap out the entire top half of the chassis to replace the keyboard. I've had unending issues with their ideapad line motherboards. That laptop went through two replacement motherboards and was out of commission for months. The build quality of their all-in-one is terrible and you have to do a complete disassembly to add ram. I say this as someone who had to do small business IT. I have fixed 4 separate models from them and each one had terrible build quality.
Also, dont forget about the superfish scandal.
Asus is fine. I and several friends have had many of their laptops. Though one of my friends had the motherboard on his TUF line completely died out of no where.
Dell's build quality and repairablitity remains solid. Easy to source replacement parts. Good Linux support. I've had the fewest problems with their hardware
Also checkout framework if you have the money. Good stuff from them. Really how laptops should be. Each part has it's own qr code so you can immediately identify it and get a replacement if needed. It's amazing.
the original pinephone was basically too slow to be usable
there were a few hardware quirks that had to be fixed in software but made mainlining drivers for it difficult
the lack of community updates (and you could argue overall community management) caused some developers to move away while also impeded pine64s ability to attract new developers
the lack of any sort of funding for developers made it difficult for people to work on as any more than a hobby (not necessarily pine64's fault, but it's the reality)
poor battery life (better idle and sleep support would have been software issues but the hardware was designed to be cheap instead of really useful)
daily driving Linux on a phone is a poor experience - not pine64s fault but there's a bunch of support missing in Linux that needs to be developed before early adopters can really use Linux phones. Modem power management, audio switching between Bluetooth and speaker, MMS support, camera support, etc.
I have a minisforum v3 that I'm not using - just don't love the surface style form factor. I'm willing to sell it for a good price if anyone is interested. Based in USA. Feel free to DM me
Avoid lenovo. Their build quality went to crap and they're easily the least repairable laptop on the market these days.
I've had to repair 4 lenovos within the last few years. Cheap parts and the laptops all had their keyboards plastic rivited to the top shell of the chassis, making it impossible to replace without buying a new chassis. One of the laptops had to have two motherboard replacements before it was usable.
Their all-in-one doesn't have a frame around the LCD panel, and they didn't put access doors in the back panel. So if you want to upgrade the ram or ssd you have a 70% chance of breaking the screen.
Onshape has a free tier, though all the cad files you make in it are publically available. That being said, it's easy to use and, since it's browser based, completely comparable with linux
Some of the installs can be a little weird, but I've never had anything that I couldn't get running.
Vscode has an install for tumbleweed
https://code.visualstudio.com/Download
The major "issue" is the package names are different between Debian and tumbleweed, so if you're installing software from github that isn't directly provided by suse/appimage/flatpak then a lot of times you'll need to install the dependencies manually by finding the corresponding packages (since most github repositories have directions for Debian/Ubuntu and not suse)
Oh man the extension for merging nodes is going to be fantastic.
A few weeks ago I was using inkscape to clean up some dxf drawings I exported from some CAD models. Each line segment was just overlapping and not actually connected. I had to come up with some convoluted work flow to select and merge the nodes manually. Super excited that this exists now
I had no idea that (open)SUSE was so security minded in their packaging. It makes sense in retrospec. It sucks they didn't catch this earlier, but this response makes me happy to use tumbleweed
I'd recommend the sengled ZigBee bulbs. They're cheap, reliable, and have good colors. Ive been using many for years without issue.
The IKEA bulbs will also work. I've tried them in the past, but didn't like them. I found they were too dim at full brightness. Also, their colors are much much worse then the sengled bulbs, especially the "greens" (I say this in quotes because the best the IKEA bulbs can do is a pitiful color that's 85% yellow and 15% green).
I'll second tumbleweed. I use it on 4 separate devices and its rarely given me any issues. If it does, it has built-in recovery snapshots - it takes 30 seconds to roll back a bad update.
A few months back we had a bad wind storm. I was driving home from work in the dark that night on some back country roads. I come around a curve and see some asshole with a flashlight in the middle of the road. Thankfully I wasn't going too fast and I was able to break to a stop without slamming on my brakes.
Turns out it was a lady who lived in a house on the road. One of the old trees from the forest there had fallen into the road, blocking both lanes. With no streetlights there was a good chance if she hadn't been there, I would have ran into it.
As I got out of my car, she told me she was watching to make sure no one hit the tree. She had called the towns emergency line but the police were tied up with other issues from the storm.
Some guy came out of his house up the way a few minutes later. He had a chain saw with him. He, myself, and another driver worked to clear any debris in the road. 5 minutes later the road was perfectly clear, and the driver and chainsaw guy walked off without saying any words.
Those people likely saved myself from car damage, as well as a good 20 minutes at least from having to find an alternate route home.